Bill Clinton's Garbage Man

By Michael Lewis

Published: September 21, 1997

On Jan. 20 of this year, Harold Ickes left his job at the White House and returned to private life. He had been fired on short notice from his job as President Clinton's deputy chief of staff and was not fully prepared for the ordeal of departure. Just getting out of the White House takes four or five hours, even for a man who dismisses red tape with obscenities as often and as gustily as Harold Ickes does. You must pay off your debts at the White House mess, return your cell phone, fill out forms, submit to security debriefings. But for Ickes the departure was especially arduous; he left with more baggage than most.

Once he'd finished with the official checkout he trundled box after cardboard box down from his office into the parking lot. Janice Enright, his White House assistant, had parked her car in the first slot beside the West Wing exit, and Ickes filled it up to the brim, several times over. In all, he carried out about 50 boxes groaning with papers: news clippings, fund-raising documents, private notes scribbled during White House meetings, private memos to the President. In one pile were detailed notes about the Asian fund-raiser in chief John Huang. In another pile was a three-ring binder that contained a brief history of fund-raising for Presidential campaigns that Ickes had compiled for the President in the summer of 1995. This was done in response to newspaper articles that accused Clinton of selling access to the highest bidder. Sensing the President was embarrassed by the accusations and might need a fall guy, Ickes also sent Clinton his resignation

The President declined to accept the resignation, and there begins the most newsworthy subplot in the friendship between Harold Ickes and Bill Clinton. Right up to Election Day, 1996, Ickes continued to offer access to the President in order to raise money for the Clinton campaign. So insatiable was the candidate, and so alarmingly gifted was Ickes, that he was among the first to catch the eye of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, headed by the Republican Fred Thompson, when it began its investigation earlier this year of campaign finance.

Sometime in the next couple of weeks Ickes will be hauled before Thompson's committee as it continues its mind-numbing hearings. The Senators are likely to question him ad nauseam about John Huang, Buddhist nuns, Chinese conspiracies and the fine points of soft and hard money, and Ickes says he will do his best to take the Senators seriously.

At this point they are no longer trying to get at the truth,'' he says. They are just trying to catch you on perjury.

But just beneath the surface of the Senator's ponderous questions will lie the giddy hope that Harold Ickes -- the patron saint of Presidential ingratitude -- will turn on Bill Clinton and spill the beans. And there are a lot of beans to spill. For 25 years Ickes, 58, has been a friend of Bill Clinton's. But he has also been something else. Ickes has been caught up in so many of Clinton's scandals and crises that he came to describe his function in the White House as ''director of the sanitation department.''

As campaign manager of Clinton's '92 New York campaign, he persuaded the state's Democrats to stick with Clinton while Gennifer Flowers strutted luridly through the national imagination. (His persuasion saved Clinton's candidacy.) He was present in the most famous opening scene in Presidential literature, the first few pages of ''Primary Colors,'' when the candidate charms the pants off everyone in Harlem. (Ickes is given the pseudonym ''Howard Ferguson 3d'' but other than that, he says, the author Joe Klein took the scene straight from life.) At Clinton's behest Ickes came to Washington in 1994, ostensibly to work on health care, but was instead handed the Whitewater file and told that it was now his problem. As the 1996 election approached Ickes helped guide his friend Jesse Jackson to the decision not to run, and then he put together the most wildly successful, and most successfully wild, money-raising operation ever conducted by the Democratic Party.

But three days after Clinton's triumphant re-election, Ickes walked out onto the doorstep of his Georgetown house, picked up The Wall Street Journal and read that he was on the way out. The man Clinton wanted as his new chief of staff, a well-to-do Southerner and relative newcomer to Clinton's life named Erskine Bowles, had demanded Ickes's head as a condition of service. Clinton was going to give it to him.

And so now the President's garbage man was leaving, and taking with him the records of what he did. And Lord, what records they are! From the moment Ickes arrived at the White House he was the guy everyone else in the room noticed scribbling notes. Even after the Whitewater hearings, when it was clear that anything you put down on paper could be held against you, Ickes kept scribbling away. He couldn't have been more conspicuous about it: he scribbled his notes standing up! It gave him the air of a man who refused to join the crowd, but the main reason Ickes stood through meetings was to avoid falling asleep.